Albany Democrats want controversial panel to redraw new Assembly lines
Try, try again.
Albany Democrats want to go back to a much-criticized panel to redraw Assembly district lines despite a recent history of failure that led congressional Democrats to go after one another in a desperate bid for political survival.
A legal brief filed this week in Manhattan Supreme Court details the Democratic Party effort to empower the Independent Redistricting Commission after the bipartisan panel deadlocked as expected on new maps for Congress and the state Legislature earlier this year — a development that eventually left Democrats to grossly gerrymander the lines, which were then tossed out by the courts.
“Since a court — the Appellate Division — has ordered that the state Assembly districts be amended, the plain language of Article III [of the state Constitution] mandates that the IRC initiate the constitutional process for making the Court-ordered revisions to the Assembly district,” reads the legal filing.
The filing, first reported by WSKG, marks the latest twist in a redistricting process that has tormented Democrats ever since the state Court of Appeals struck down their preferred lines for Congress and the state Legislature in April.
Court-appointed special master Jonathan Cervas then created new maps for the state Senate and Congress that have fueled a civil war among Democrats in New York, with longtime incumbents like Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney now embroiled in tough electoral battles ahead of the Aug. 23 primary election.
But legal technicalities kept the Assembly lines in place for months before they too were invalidated by a court, which allowed incumbent-favorable new lines in the Assembly to remain in place this year before getting axed by 2024.
Democrats are pushing the court to allow the commission to make a new map in hopes of getting a relatively favorable result compared to a court-appointed special master like Cervas.
“The corrupt legislators who got us into this mess want the recourse to be going back to the IRC. They want this because they believe the IRC will have a high probability of failing to adopt maps yet again and then this can get punted back to the legislature. We want to skip the bureaucratic hurdles and move straight to a special master,” New York Young Republican Club President Gavin Wax, who filed the initial suit challenging the Assembly lines with political gadfly Gary Greenberg and former gubernatorial candidate Paul Nichols, told The Post on Wednesday.
Oral arguments are scheduled for Aug. 19, according to Wax, who added the date might change.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Gov. Kathy Hochul, state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and the Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment that developed new maps on behalf of lawmakers.
A Heastie spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday on the brief filed on behalf of the Democratic supermajority in the 150-member chamber.
“We have to get the process right, and the only way in the foreseeable future to do that is to take it out of the hands of a self serving legislature, until they can demonstrate that people come first,” Nichols added in a separate email.
